


Veux-tu sortir avec moi? (Will You Go Out With Me?)

by notsowriterly



Series: Percy Jackson Tumblr Reposts [3]
Category: Percy Jackson and the Olympians & Related Fandoms - All Media Types
Genre: And Percy tries and fails not to look like an idiot, Annabeth doodles her dream house, F/M, French!Annabeth, Language Barrier AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-18
Updated: 2015-11-18
Packaged: 2018-05-02 05:24:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,090
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5235866
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/notsowriterly/pseuds/notsowriterly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Percy is pretty sure that the foreign exchange student thinks he’s an idiot. It doesn’t help that she’s beautiful, with curly blonde hair always held up in a tight ponytail and eyes the color of steel daggers. With her looking like that, it would be hard enough for him to not sound like an idiot in English, let alone French.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Veux-tu sortir avec moi? (Will You Go Out With Me?)

Percy is pretty sure that the foreign exchange student thinks he’s an idiot. It doesn’t help that she’s beautiful, with curly blonde hair always held up in a tight ponytail and eyes the color of steel daggers. With her looking like that, it would be hard enough for him to not sound like an idiot in English, let alone  _French_.

Percy didn’t know who’s dumb idea it was to put a native french speaker in a french class full of high school students who were struggling around tenses and their own blatantly American accents. He tries to ask her about her day in French, and she spears him with an unimpressed look, babbling something in french.

Percy frowns. This has been going on for half the year, and Percy is still not sure how he could be half in love with a girl who’s never spoken a word he’d understood, who always looks at him like she’s looked at his soul and found him wanting, who doesn’t do anything but saunter into French class with her ponytail swinging and make him sigh.

Oh god, he’s a dork. He’s such a dork, Jesus Christ.

He tries to concentrate on the lesson, but his gaze sways back to her again. Her notebook is one half meticulously scribbled notes and the other half beautifully drawn buildings. One of them, recurring throughout all the notes he’s seen, peeks of it, here and there, is a beautiful beach house, somehow managing to be elegant as it is summery, and Percy’d never known that buildings could be truly elegant without dripping with the opulence that Wall Street had.

“ _Bella batiment_ ,” He says, and her face goes abruptly blank. Percy internally groans. He’s pretty sure he said a swear or something dirty and completely offended her instead of what he wants to say, so he holds up his hands before she can speak, panicked. “I meant that your building was pretty! Not…Whatever I just said. Wait, you can’t understand me, never mind,  _merci_ –” Percy wonders what it would be like if a hole swallowed him up at this moment. Probably more pleasant than having Annabeth completely humiliate him in class.

She interrupts his panicking, holding up her notebook and pointing to one of the doodles. “ _Belle bâtiment?_ ” He shakes his head. Yes, that house was pretty, but it wasn’t _the_  house. She frowns, and Percy scrambles to make amends, pointing to the peek of a front porch that he’s sure belonged to the house. Her eyes widen, and she points to the drawing. “ _Belle bâtiment_?” he nods, and then the French teacher yells at them both to stop talking and she turns back to her book.

But out of the corner of his eye, throughout the class, Percy can see her giving him an odd look.

——–

The next day, she comes to his lunch table, while Percy and Grover are arguing whether the school lunch burritos actually count as burritos. Grover argues for school lunches, because Grover eats everything.

And then, a familiar voice asks, “ _Puis-je m'asseoir ici?_ ”

Percy stares up at her. He didn’t even know that she was in his lunch period. He’s never seen her around before. On his right, Piper gives Annabeth a bright grin. “ _Bien sûr! Êtes-vous l'étudiant de change? Je suis_  Piper, _cela est_  Grover,  _qui est_  Rachel,  _et_ Percy  _de cet idiot._ ” Percy stares at her. Jeans ripped, Hello Kitty tank top wearing Piper with her choppy hair braided almost with contempt, like she would have rather hacked off her hair than braided it, speaking fluent French? Vaguely, in the back of his mind he realizes that she said his name and the word idiot in the same sentence, and that he should probably be offended, but he’s too busy gaping.

Piper scowls at him. “What? My mother was french.” Percy shuts his mouth and makes way for Annabeth,  _who sits next to him_ , and tries very hard not to pay attention to the way their arms brush together. She smells like apples.

“ _Je rencontrai Percy avant. Nous sommes dans la même classe. Et je sais déjà qu'il est un idiot._ ” He hears his name again, and the word idiot, and his face goes up in flames. So he was right. She did think he was an idiot. “ _Il est aussi très gentil._ ” She says, softer, and Piper grins at Percy, knowingly.

“I think she’ll fit in very well here,” Piper says, and Percy knows he’s fucked.

—-

Piper and Annabeth become an unstoppable force, Grover looks charmed by her, and Leo and Annabeth have become fast friends after she saw him making one of her doodles out of pipe cleaners. Even Rachel is warming up to her, despite them not speaking the same language at all. Percy doesn’t know how it’s possible that she could like every single one of his friends, and yet not like him. She’s distant with him, keeps giving him those unimpressed looks and then sometimes that odd look, the one that Percy is pretty sure her god-I-didn’t-think-he-could-be- _this_ -stupid look.

And now, with his friends around her, and Piper translating, he finds that he likes her even more. She’s smart, and funny sometimes, and ridiculously competent, and Percy finds himself helplessly looking at her when he’s sure she doesn’t notice.

Finally, towards the end of the year, a month before prom, he decides,  _Fuck it._

He’s sure this is going to go terribly when he looks it up and makes a sign, getting Rachel to draw the house that he now calls Annabeth’s house, the one that’s in her doodles all the time. And then above it, in his sloppy handwriting, marring the entire effect–because he wasn’t about to ask Piper about this, she’d laugh at him for ages–he wrote in French: Do you want to go out with me? _Veux-tu sortir avec moi?_

He holds it up at their lunch table, before anyone arrives, and Annabeth comes as she always does, laughing with Piper, probably at him. But then she catches sight of him, and stops in her tracks.

Percy’s sure that his heart never beat so hard.

She comes forward, and god, she looks angry. Her eyes are like hardened steel. Percy braces himself for her to slap him in the face, sure that he translated something wrong, did something wrong, but then she takes his face in her hands, and kisses him, _hard_.

He drops the sign.

In the background, he’s pretty sure he can hear his friends cheering.

**Author's Note:**

> (Head cannon that all the times she’s babbling in French, Annabeth is lamenting the fact that Percy’s so cute but so stupid, and she knows a little bit of English but doesn’t use it, because she thinks the furrow he gets between his eyebrows when he can’t understand her is the most adorable thing ever.)


End file.
